PST Headed to 9%?

Each day that goes by the cost to Manitobans keeps going up. That is because each and every day the NDP are busy making more promises and spending more money that they don’t have.

As the spring 2016 provincial election gets closer, the NDP seem to get more desperate and more reckless with your money. In an effort to prop up his political fortunes after a year of infighting and rebellion in the NDP, Greg Selinger is busy trying to buy back the support of Manitobans.

While it is true to say that the spending spree is happening with your money, it is actually more accurate to say that it is happening with your grandchildren’s and their grandchildren’s money because it is all being done with borrowed funds. The NDP ran out of money years ago so these and other promises are from future borrowing.

Just how much are the NDP pre-election promises adding up to? The Throne Speech which the NDP brought forward in November contains at least $6.7 billion in new promises over the next several years. This will be, if the NDP are re-elected, added to the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual deficits that Greg Selinger is currently running each year. Already under Mr. Selinger the provinces debt has doubled in the past six years and if things continue will triple by 2023.

So how is the NDP going to pay for all of this if they are re-elected in spring? Certainly some of it will just be more debt, but as we saw after the 2011 election, borrowing isn’t enough. After that election the NDP broke their promise not to raise taxes and not only put PST on things such as home insurance and hairstyling, but raised it to 8% after having explicitly promised they would not.

That means that Mr. Selinger is going to have to come back to Manitobans to help finance these pre-election promises. There is little doubt that he will be back at it again and have to raise the PST, this time to 9% as well as put it on even more things that Manitobans rely upon.

And of course, Mr. Selinger isn’t finished spending your money, because the election hasn’t actually officially started yet. No doubt the more desperate he becomes, the more expensive the promises will become.

When asked this week by the media about whether he would have to raise taxes to pay for all of these promises, Mr. Selinger said that he couldn’t rule anything out. Which means the NDP is going for broke when it comes to this election – literally.